Spring equinox at Stone Mountain

 It was 26 degrees Monday morning, a tad chilly for the first day of spring.

I sometimes feel baffled by this new place in the Georgia Piedmont. I sometimes feel as we live half a mile south of the North Pole. Flowers are blooming everywhere, and water dish on the birdfeeder is frozen.

On the last day of winter, a few of the beech trees still have last year’s leaves. But most of the leaves are finally on the ground. It looks like the forest south of Stone Mountain is covered in khaki-colored snow.

In my bewilderment, a wonderful book called The Natural Communities of Georgia has become my bible. The authors distinguish mesic forests — forests associated with moist soils — from other kinds of forests associated with drier soils.

I usually take those classifications with a huge grain of salt. My eye tends to find the exceptions, rather than the rules.

But as winter leaves, I have to say it allowed me to see what the scholarly authors were talking about.

In winter, you can see through the mesic forests of the creek bottoms. All the leaves are on the ground. From the creek bottom, looking up at the rising land, I could see where the soils became dry enough for pines.

I usually dismiss such classifications as the stuff of textbooks, rather than things you’d actually see if you put on a good pair of boots. But the line between the deciduous trees of the mesic forest and the pines of drier soils could have been made with a strait edge.

• Sources: Leslie Edwards, Jonathan Ambrose and L. Katherine Kirkman, The Natural Communities of Georgia; Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 2013.

Trees that hold their leaves through winter are called marcescent. If you need a primer, see “And baffled by the beeches,” Feb. 7, 2023.